Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn (5 page)

A pride came over me. I love that about my people.

I ride the 21A bus route that goes from Minneapolis to St. Paul through an economically challenged area of town. Stores along the street have new signs in Somali, Spanish, and Hmong, among the old ones in Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish.

There’s a woman on the 21A who always sits near the front in the section reserved for the disabled. She wears a button that says, “I feed my husband but I talk to my cat.” Next to her is a bag of groceries. She talks to everyone at once about her friend Ruby. “She worked at the fair where you throw darts at balloons and this little kid comes up to play, well he was too little for darts, but Ruby gave him one anyway, and before she could turn around he’d thrown it, and it stuck right in her nose, well if you knew Ruby that isn’t such an amazing shot, but she gave the kid his money back, which I would have never done, and I tell Ruby about lockjaw, and when did she have her last tetanus shot, it’d been over three years, and I told Ruby she better go in for that shot. ‘Oh, I’ll be all right,’ says Ruby, but she was awfully quiet the rest of the night, and I caught her in the corner several times wiggling her jaw.”

There’s this kid who sits near the back of the bus, always talking to people only he can hear. The lady up front explains that he has an amazing brain. He can’t tie his shoes, but he can name every city with a Kmart, in alphabetical order. She says if you’re riding the whole route, you should ask him to do it, makes you want to travel.

One time a man gets on the bus and stands up front swaying, extremely intoxicated. He shouts, “Roger,” and waves. Immediately, everyone on the bus knows two things. One, there is no Roger on this bus, and two, one of us will have to be Roger. Today, it’s me. The man plants himself next to me.

“Roger, how you doing, pal? … Yes, you are too Roger, Roger … yes, you are, yes, yes, yes.” His eyes roll around like eggs on a ship. “Yes, yes.” I can tell he’s forgotten his argument but remembers he was in the affirmative.

“Lookit, two weeks ago, I had it made, beautiful job, full-time wife. Care for a smoke, woops, I’m out, you got one? How ’bout lending me some change, no sense getting uppity, sorry I’m alive.”

Before he leans over and falls asleep, he’s told me he was a CEO of a major company, a concert pianist, a place kicker for the Miami Dolphins, and if he told me his name, I would recognize it. Hard times can land on anyone.

Another time the 21A was at a stop. The bus driver says he’ll be right back, then runs across the street to a convenience store. That morning I had been to the Social Security office, applying for disability benefits after a motorcycle accident paralyzed my right arm and left me unable to work. The first question on the questionnaire read, “What’s wrong with you?” I couldn’t bring myself to answer that one. Someday I know I’ll need the money bad enough to answer it, but not that day.

We’re waiting for the driver to return and get the bus moving when the kid behind me starts talking loudly, naming U.S. cities with a Kmart at a blistering pace.

A man up front, who had been holding his head in his hands, stands. Now we see this is one truly frightening man. It’s his eyes. They have a blank, remorseless gaze. It is obvious that he is capable of anything. We’re all thinking the same thing: “Please, just go out the door.” But the scary man suddenly turns and faces the passengers. He points to the cat lady, smiles, says, “She’s in charge now,” dings the bell, moves toward the open door, and he’s gone.

It’s quiet on the bus. The cat lady is smiling, obviously pleased but not surprised she was put in charge. We all feel pretty good with the choice. There is peace. The driver returns and asks if anything happened while he was out. Nobody says a word, not even the lady, who still looks happy. We pull away, smiling in silent recognition, secretly knowing who is in charge, and you know what? There’s nothing “wrong” with us.

When I was in Australia in 1987, a man explained family to me. He was a barrister, a lawyer for aboriginal land rights. He said it’s hard to save the land for the indigenous people, because the government’s rules for passing property to surviving relatives are based on heredity, and the indigenous Australians have a different family structure. In western culture, inheritance runs vertically like a tree, but for the people here, family trees run more like vines around the earth.

I said I didn’t understand.

He told me one group has a unique familial system. When you are still in your mother’s womb, you kick your first kick of life. She feels it and marks the spot on the earth where you kicked, then goes and gets the elders. Australia is lined with trails and paths, and you kicked on one of those paths. The elders determine what path that was, and you are related to everyone around the globe who kicked on that trail. He said, “Those are your uncles and aunts, brothers and cousins. Go to a village and stand in the southwest corner, which tells people you’ve come in peace. Sooner or later, someone will recognize you as a relative. Now, it might take them three weeks because you’re white and not from here, but sooner or later, someone will know you as one of their own.”

Recognition. That’s what Dr. King was talking about. It’s what makes us family. If we recognize each other as our own, suddenly there is someone nearby in times of need, there are more reasons to celebrate, feel pride and accomplishment.

When we set down the weight of fear, as Dr. King often said, we rise together.

VALENTINE’S DAY  

It’s said that there are two kinds of people: people who believe there are two kinds of people and people who don’t.

It’s said that there are two kinds of emotions: love and fear, and every other emotion is but a subset of those two emotions.

Aristophanes, the great poet of ancient Greece, asserted that the first humans had four arms, four legs, and two heads. But we had so much fun we began to defy the gods. Zeus, in his anger, split everyone in two, so now we each have two arms, two legs, and one head, and we are forever looking for our other halves. I like what Zeus said next: “And if you don’t knock it off, you’re going down to one leg.”

We are creatures of love, for love, and to love. There is no higher pursuit than to accept and give love, to hold what is sacred in another and to protect another’s solace.

And there is the euphoria of love. When we are in love, gravity stops being a law and becomes a suggestion. Our consonants desert us. A magic glow surrounds the world. We imagine our lives as perfect.

But love doesn’t always work that way. I remember those cross-stitched wall hangings in my grandmother’s kitchen, the “Recipe for Love: One cup kindness, two teaspoons tenderness,” and all the rest. Like there was an actual recipe. But love isn’t a formula, and that’s why our lives are stories, not syllogisms—and especially love stories.

That’s why when lovers look at the stars, they don’t see a means to calculate a vector, they see the eyes of the ones they cherish.

There is that beautiful Bible verse from First Corinthians, the one that never fails to play on the emotions when it’s used at weddings: “Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

And it’s true, love is all those things. But we’re not. We’re human, at times fallible, proud, scared. We want love because it holds all the things that we are often not. And when we allow love to rule our lives, we are given glimpses, moments of grace, a dance with the divine, the white-hot joy of being truly alive.

A psychologist told me that it’s a sign of a healthy mind when a person is curious and wants to master that which makes him curious. I feel love works the same way.

Love needs to grow and change.

It thrives in audacity and dies in carelessness.

I first recognized romantic love in Miss Jensen’s fifth-grade class. The day before Valentine’s Day, I carefully sort through my stack of Valentine cards. Thirty cards to a pack, thirty students to a class. Choices have to be made. What does this card say? What should this card say? And what should this card not be saying? Never give a girl a picture of a car, or a boy a ballerina. And when in doubt, go with a circus motif. A card bearing the words “Be My Valentine,” is the most intimate, and therefore the most dangerous. You’re stuck with four to a pack, so send them to one or two girls you trust and your best pals, with “You know what I mean” penciled in under the cartoon figure. Then, put the card in an envelope with a pastel colored candy heart, the worst candy ever invented, with phrases like “Why not,” and “Uh-oh,” and “What’s that?” Phrases that seem to have nothing to do with love. Then you drop the envelope into a brightly colored shoebox, walk away, and never look back. Walk away. When I dig into my doily, tin foil, and red crepe paper shoebox, I find twenty-eight circus motifs and a couple of cars.

Later that day, we assemble in the gym for a social dance. All the girls are against one wall, the boys against the other. Miss Jensen blows her whistle, “TWEEEET.” Then Miss Jensen puts a polka record on the metal record player, the record player you could hit with a medicine ball and it wouldn’t skip. You could see vinyl peeling up from behind the needle. “TWEEET!” And we all come together to find partners and start dancing. I go looking for a partner, but none of the girls will dance with me. I am tiny. They are all so much taller, and their bodies are starting to change. They don’t want some little head down there.

Many years later I was standing in the Outback of Australia. In the center of this vast, arid continent was a puddle of water. The puddle, on close examination, was teeming with activity. I asked the guide what was going on in there and he said these were thousands of tiny crustaceans, like shrimp, that lived in these dry areas. For about 364 days each year, they remain dormant in these hollows. Then one day it rains, and the puddles fill with water and the shrimp come to life. The puddles usually last only a day, so the shrimp have to do everything in their lives quickly: eat, sleep, procreate. The guide then explained this had been particularly wet year, and these puddles had been here for almost three weeks. I looked at the shrimp again, and they were definitely worse for the wear but still going at it full bore. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t stop the party.

I thought, that’s junior high. There’s junior high, right there in that puddle. In junior high, I started to notice girls, but they wanted nothing to do with me. For one thing, I was small. Not small … tiny. When I took driver’s education, the instructor looked at me and said, “It’s a good thing you live in the Twin Cities. You need both.” And he shoved the Minneapolis
and
St. Paul phone books under me so I could see over the steering wheel.

I still couldn’t pass the driving test. I flunked four times. Whenever I parallel parked, I ended up in the middle of the road. It looked like I worked for UPS. So I had to take a special driving course taught by the high school shop teacher.

The most feared man in that high school was the shop teacher.

Ex-Marine, flattop haircut, lab coat with a pocket protector. He rode his bike to school every day. Spring, winter, fall, 30 below zero, here he comes, wind blistering his face, my brother and I standing in the cafeteria window watching him ride past while we sing the theme song of the Wicked Witch from
The Wizard of Oz.

Every morning the shop teacher started out with a story to help “straighten us out.” One day he said, “Boys, I was in the big one,”—Korea—“and once when I was walking down the road there was a hand, just a hand in the road, and there was a sandwich in that hand. Did I eat that sandwich? Damn right I ate that sandwich, best sandwich I ever ate.”

Oh, man, I was paralyzed by fear.

And Scotch-taped above the lathe, the drill press, the table saw, every power tool in the shop, were newspaper clippings and magazine articles about children who were maimed on that particular tool. For my senior project I built a cribbage board that required using only a hand saw, a hand drill, and sandpaper. I didn’t even have to plug anything in, but that didn’t stop me from crying, “Oh God, I know I’ll be the picture over the hand drill.”

The shop teacher started the driver’s education class by showing a movie called
Signal 30
.
Signal 30
was the code cops used when there was a fatality in an accident. Every scene ended with “Too late for this young man” and the jaws of life tearing open a car behind the narrator. One of four things happened to everyone in that class. You either passed out, threw up, never learned to drive, or loved it: “Oh yeah, that’s me.”

The shop teacher also taught the sex education class, and he showed a movie that was just like
Signal 30,
only it was designed for sex. And the same four things happened to everyone in the class.

In time, I finally passed my driving test, but in matters of love, I remained hopelessly confused. I know our pastor at church would say, “Look to Jesus.”